Glad to here you found a solution

care to share it with us?

Just using the instructions here (The site you shared with me)

http://www.ozgrid.com/Excel/autocomplete-validation.htm

I had tried this in the past but it hadn't worked because the space between the cells that the list was referenced and the data validation cell was too great. But by playing around with hiding rows, I managed to get the selection to sit directly above the 'customer' data validation cell without changing my formatting